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* * *

Seeing Tom subdued always frightened Rafiel a little. He'd been through law enforcement courses. He knew Tom's type.

Tom was the kind of person who usually had to be dragged away from whatever incident had just happened, still kicking and screaming and throwing a fit. The sort of person who could never get a traffic ticket without adding resisting arrest to the charges. The sort of person, in fact, who wasn't subdued unless he were very sick or very scared. Since Tom didn't look either, Rafiel had to assume freezing did something to shifter dragons.

Reptiles. Cold blood. Can't they die if they get cold enough? He didn't want to think about it, and besides, he'd given Tom a hoodie. Granted, it was Rafiel's size, and therefore a bit long on Tom, but that was good as it would go over Tom's hands.

Rafiel started towards the river, and then started, slowly, down the slope. His knee still hurt from banging it on the path when he had fallen and he had no intention of taking another header.

"Here," Tom said, stepping up beside him and offering him a hand. "My boots are sturdier than yours."

Rafiel took Tom's hand for support, half afraid that the very cold-feeling fingers would snap off under the grasp of his hand. He was sure—more than sure—that a normal person would have hypothermia from this adventure. But it always came back to . . . they weren't normal, were they?

They made it all the way to the bottom, where the frozen river glistened two steps from them. Unfortunately, it only glistened in the spots not covered up by snow. The rest was an amorphous, lumpy mess. He turned his flashlight on, and pointed it at the river and at that moment, Tom's phone rang. This helped Rafiel pinpoint the roughly rectangular snow-covered lump. "There," he said, nailing the shape with the beam of his flashlight. "Right there. Can you get it?"

Tom looked out speculatively. "I don't know if the ice will hold up. But if the ice breaks under me and I wet my feet, it's okay, because you'll give me a ride back to the diner, right?"

"Right," Rafiel said. Had the idiot thought that Rafiel was going to just come out, then leave him to freeze out here? "If parts of your body start breaking off from the cold I'm fairly sure Kyrie would kill me," he said, and grinned sheepishly at his friend. "So, yeah, I'll give you a ride back, you idiot."

Tom nodded and edged cautiously on top of the frozen river, with the sort of duck-footed waddle of someone trying to neither slip nor skate on the surface. In the middle of the river, he picked up the phone, then, as he was straightening, dropped it again.

"Would you stop that?" Rafiel asked impatiently. "The idea is to get back into the car and back to The George. Not to stand here and play find the phone."

But Tom shook his head, and bent, and picked up the phone again. He walked back close enough that he could whisper and Rafiel would hear him. "There's something in the tunnel under the little bridge, Rafiel. I saw a tail disappear that way."

A tail. Great. Rafiel was going to assume that, no matter how much Rafiel might want it to be otherwise, Tom didn't mean he had seen the friendly, furry, potentially wagging tail of a kitten or puppy. "Uh . . . a tail?"

"Reptilian. Dragging."

Rafiel frowned in the direction of the bridge and the shadows under it. It seemed to him, as he concentrated, that he did hear something very like a rustle from under there. But . . . a tail? "Perhaps the Great Sky Dragon sent one of your cousins to look after you."

"They're not my cousins."

"Whatever," Rafiel said, feeling an absurd pleasure, as if he'd scored a point. "They think they are."

"I'm hardly responsible for people's delusions."

How could someone like Tom, who didn't so much get in trouble as carry it into the lives of everyone around him, sound so much like a New England dowager?

"Yeah, but anyway, maybe he sent one of his underlings to look in on you?"

Tom shook his head. "Well, he did. Conan. But I sent him back his merry way. Or not merry." Tom frowned. "Besides," he whispered, "the tail looked like an alligator's."

"An alli—" Rafiel resisted an urge to smack his own forehead, and, shortly thereafter, an urge to smack Tom—hard—with the flashlight. "You mean Old Joe? The homeless guy said he told you he was at the aquarium."

"Yeah," Tom said. "I figure he's hiding out here, in alligator form."

"Is that why you're whispering? Look, what do you want with Old Joe, anyway? So he's hiding here, as an alligator. Perhaps we should leave him alone?"

Tom shook his head, which was par for the course. Of course he didn't think they should leave Old Joe alone, because that would be the life-preserving, not-getting-into-worse-trouble solution.

"Okay," Rafiel said. "So what do you want to do?"

"I figure he knows something," Tom whispered back. "And I want to find out what it is."

"Uh . . . what he knows is probably the best places to sleep when a storm threatens, and, Tom, you aren't even that with it. You ought to be indoors." And watched. By a nursemaid. Or a psychiatrist.

Tom shook his head again. Snow and ice flew from his dark hair. He frowned at Rafiel. He'd become alarmingly pale in the cold, so that he looked like he was wearing white pancake make-up, from which his lips—a vague shade of blue—the tip of his nose—a lovely violet—his dark eyebrows and his blue eyes emerged looking vaguely unnatural in all their chromatic glory. "Look, he knows something. And it's something that might help us. He knows about the Ancient Ones."

"Okay, even supposing he knows," Rafiel said impatiently, "what do you propose to do about this? And why are we whispering? If he didn't hear the cell phone ring, and doesn't know we're here, then he's way too addled to help us."

"That's not it," Tom said. "I don't want him to know we're about to go after him."

"We are? Into a sewer tunnel? After an alligator?"

"I don't think it's a sewer," Tom said, looking into the shadows under the bridge. "At least, I don't think the city would have an open sewer through a recreation area. I mean, I'm well aware that they're all crazy, but all the same, there's a difference between crazy and loony."

Not from where I'm standing, buddy. Aloud, Rafiel said, "Look at it this way—that connects to a drainage pipe somewhere. And that drainage pipe is connected, somewhere, to the Goldport sewers. You have heard of people flushing baby crocodiles, right?"

Tom made a sound of profound exasperation. "Yes, in New York City. Some science fiction writer or another wrote a very unpleasant story about it. But it's an urban legend, you know. No pet stores have sold crocodiles, that I remember. So it mustn't be legal anymore."

"Doesn't matter," Rafiel said, pragmatically. "It was legal back in the fifties. And crocodiles live forever."

"And migrate from New York City to Goldport, Colorado?" Tom shook his head. "Rafiel! Next thing you know, you're going to tell me we'll find Denver's lizard man from Cheeseman Park under there. Come on. Just come here, shine your flashlight under there. I promise I won't make you actually go under there and look amid all the dangerous animals."

He gave Rafiel one of his more irritating smiles.

"Oh, all right," Rafiel said, grudgingly.

 

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Framed